As the COVID-19 situation continues to develop in the US, Twitter has been one of the main platforms for the population to voice their thoughts and concearns regarding the pandemic. Recently, one of the most topics most present in the public conscience and social media has been the usage of facemasks and issued government mandates for the use of such, which have shown to greatly help curbing the spread of coronavirus (Chu et al. 2020). With a small but extremely vocal proportion of the population vigorously refusing to follow CDC guidelines for mask usage, which significantly aids in the spread of coronavirus, I wondered if tweets by voices against masks were less present in states with a good COVID-19 situation and response, with the opposite also possibly being true. To find out if this was truly the case, I utilized the tools developed by the RPI COVID-Twitter team to compare tweet discussions and sentiment between New York and Alabama, two states with vastly different COVID-19 situations and responses.

Final Thoughts

From my analysis of New York and Alabama tweets, I found with a good degree of confidence that anti-mask sentiment is present to a greatly larger degree in the latter, which has had a much worse COVID-19 response and is currently struggling to get it under control, therefore supporting my original hypothesis. Notable differences in sentiment profiles between tweets calling for mask usage and criticizing government figures also suggest that New Yorkers have taken a more proactive attitude on Twitter, choosing to call out those who go against CDC guidelines, while Alabamians have chosen a more passive approach which in turn leaves room for anti-mask reactionary opinions to proliferate.

To draw a more definite conclusion on Twitter anti-mask sentiment and COVID-19 development, I would to perform a more comprehensive analysis in the future with a more tweets and states. However, my results from this analysis support the hypothesis that on one hand, states with a good COVID-19 response have a lower amount of Tweitter anti-mask sentiment and more opposition to such, and possibly on the other, states with a bad COVID-19 response have greater levels of anti-mask sentiment with less opposition.

Acknowledgements

Making this analysis would be next to impossible without the backend infrastructure built by Abraham Sanders and all the work done by my fellow teammembers in COVID-Twitter, to which distinct recognition must be given.

Appendix

The plots for the New York and Alabama clustered tweets are given below for the sake of transparency, since the cluster interpretations were performed manually.

References

Bałazy, Anna, Mika Toivola, Atin Adhikari, Satheesh K Sivasubramani, Tiina Reponen, and Sergey A Grinshpun. 2006. “Do N95 Respirators Provide 95% Protection Level Against Airborne Viruses, and How Adequate Are Surgical Masks?” American Journal of Infection Control 34 (2). Elsevier: 51–57.

Chu, Derek K, Elie A Akl, Stephanie Duda, Karla Solo, Sally Yaacoub, Holger J Schünemann, Amena El-harakeh, et al. 2020. “Physical Distancing, Face Masks, and Eye Protection to Prevent Person-to-Person Transmission of Sars-Cov-2 and Covid-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” The Lancet. Elsevier.

Fiscus, Kirsten. 2020. “Alabama & Coronavirus Timeline: How Covid-19 Spread and How the State Reacted.” Montgomery Advisor, June. https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2020/06/30/alabama-coronavirus-timeline-covid-19-spread-alabama-response/3284467001/.

Francescani, Chris. 2020. “Timeline: The First 100 Days of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Covid-19 Response.” ABC News, June. https://abcnews.go.com/US/News/timeline-100-days-york-gov-andrew-cuomos-covid/story?id=71292880.